


The Nature of Children

by the_sockpuppet



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Conversation, Dialogue Heavy, F/F, Gen, Other, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 01:10:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5270909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_sockpuppet/pseuds/the_sockpuppet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Quartz tells Garnet of her plans. Pre-canon. Mentions of RosePearl, RoseGreg, death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nature of Children

During the war Rose Quartz and Garnet often discussed tactics. Garnet was not the only tactician with Future Vision – the enemy too had its own cadre of strategists. The game boiled down to intel. The better informed the advisors were, the more efficiently they crunched the probabilities. Garnet spent long periods of time in Rose’s room, refining formations, watching gems getting shattered again and again, infinite futures with only a few branches reaching their goal of peace.

The war ended, one day: it was all over. It was time to reassess what a relationship meant during peacetime. Garnet was born in war, born out of desperation and love. As peace settled and the world forgot, she had to find herself, too, and for a long time, she looked inward and outward, looking for her own answers. Pearl and Rose Quartz and their relationship was better left to them.

Still the peace deepened. She drifted in and out of Rose Quartz’s orbit – they’d watch humans and talk about them, or talk about space and all they’d lost, or talk about being stuck in a hunk of dirt forever and how Garnet wondered if this was all that was to living: mopping after the remnants of war that never ended, half grieved and never fully in peace with all the loss.  _Peace is not stagnation_ , Rose Quartz had agreed once, sometime during the Enlightenment.  _I don’t know if we’re moving forward or back._  They were discussing the fact that they still could not find all their comrades. Garnet could not give it up. She had settled who she was. She had not settled where her comrades had gone.

Garnet had once been promised honesty – including the honest answer that Rose Quartz could not tell her what she was cooking up, or the honest answer that sometimes Rose Quartz didn’t have an answer. Change would be coming, Garnet knew that much, but Rose Quartz was never in a hurry. Some of her trees had taken hundreds of years to grow, sitting there placidly in the sun, ready to stand on roots if war suddenly came to their door. Until then monsters knocked at their door and they continued their eternal clean-up operations. In between they grew fat and lazy. Garnet was made of many things, but this tension, of a surface peace versus an underlying war, of centuries-long sameness and a past they couldn’t shake off, this tension tore at her more than Ruby and Sapphire’s occasional disagreements.

It wasn’t war that came to their door, or the answer to their missing fellow soldiers, but a human that looked like all the rest. Garnet put aside her missions and paid attention to home. At the same time she was a soldier she was also a member of the family, and her family was about to change.

And on one evening, she finally had Rose Quartz to herself, in between Greg and Pearl and Amethyst all vying for Rose Quartz’s attention. They sat against a log, on the sands. In front of them was a fire that barely crackled, and the long sea further ahead. The stars glittered above, a blanket of security that Garnet knew could not last forever. The wind blew around them.

“I think,” Rose Quartz said, “that I might be falling in love with Greg.”

Garnet smiled wryly. “I’ve never heard someone so sad about it.”

Rose Quartz sighed. “I can’t help but think about Pearl.”

Garnet said nothing. She wasn’t the sort to dip into their complications. She hadn’t, in fact dipped into their complications.

“It’s strange how we can be so far away from Homeworld but even then… I just keep wishing I was anyone else but her liege.”

“It’s partly what Pearl is doing to you,” Garnet said, not unkindly. “What’s in her head is not your fault.”

“It wasn’t her fault she was given to me, either.”

“So there you have it: there’s no one to blame.”

“That doesn’t solve the problem.” Rose snorted. “Greg really knows how to give me a hard time.”

Garnet laughed. “Blame it on the human.”

“Love is torture. I knew it the moment Pearl chose to stay with me on Earth. I couldn’t tell what she was doing it for. For herself? For me? For the Earth?”

They both knew that Rose Quartz was always Pearl’s first priority, and that the murky waters of why that was so, were waters that would never clear up.

“What sort of future did you have in mind for her?”

“The freedom to travel the stars. Perhaps she couldn’t, in gem-controlled space, but space is so much larger than an empire. It’s infinite. And Pearl can take it on, the whole vastness of it, not daunted by its size.”

Garnet smiled. “And you love that about her.”

Rose Quartz snorted. “Oh, and you don’t?”

“Pearl is easy to love. Even when she’s a selfish, exasperating brat. I guess I can’t quite help myself.”

“Neither could I. They’re actually more alike than they know,” and Garnet knew Rose Quartz meant Greg, “They’re both exasperating. And Greg is naive. In much the same way Pearl once was.”

“Well, let’s be glad he wouldn’t get himself killed for his ignorance.”

Rose Quartz laughed. “Your humor, Garnet… it’s so you. Not quite Ruby, not quite Sapphire.”

“They’re both bad at humor, truth be told.”

The evening deepened into a shivering kind of cold. The smoky kindling bothered Garnet’s eyes – she should have used dryer branches, the wood burns so badly, but they’d just put the whole thing together in a rush, with no time to forage for branches where they were dryer.

“I don’t think the war ever ended for us,” Rose Quartz said. “We set out to change things. How much did we change? There’s nothing left of us. You can’t rebuild gem society without any gems. I think we’re dinosaurs, sometimes.”

“We’re like those old soldiers wondering what we’re for, is what you mean.”

“Don’t be angry at me for saying this, Garnet,” Rose Quartz said, “but I sometimes wish that I could just go somewhere where I’m not myself. Pearl was awfully angry at me when I said that. But I told her –  _if I weren’t Rose Quartz, then you’d be the gem I loved, not… not a Pearl_. You can’t build something new with old things. We all cling to old ways. We’re all like that. Our base is like that. How we think is like that. Amethyst doesn’t think like us.” Rose Quartz paused. “She really is the one good thing that came out of that mess.”

Garnet suddenly sat up very straight. She knew, at the back of her head, that Rose Quartz going somewhere – meant going away permanently. “Rose Quartz,” she said, and Rose understood immediately, like in the old days, when they’d both come to the same conclusion regarding some strategy.

“Organic transmutation is a possibility,” Rose Quartz said.

“With Greg?”

“He was the missing ingredient in my plans.”

“No,” Garnet said. “I can’t agree to this. We have changed.”

“I’ve reached my limits,” Rose Quartz said in reply. “I don’t think you have. Certainly Pearl has room to grow, and Amethyst. There’s potential there. But as for me: I’m old, and I am, in fact, a pillar of the old gem ways. I should have gone during the war. I would have been the last thing binding you three to Homeworld. I am the last thing binding you three. You three are the future: a fusion, a Pearl, and an Amethyst not made for war. I’m the only ‘proper’ gem left. I’m the piece that doesn’t quite fit in the new world.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Garnet said. “You started the change.”

“And I know when it’s time to move on,” she said. “I can’t solve the puzzles that remain on Earth. Do you really think Homeworld is lying still? I’m tired, Garnet. A variable must change. I am that variable.”

“I can’t agree to this,” Garnet said. “I won’t agree to it.”

“Look into the future,” Rose Quartz said. “There’s nothing to see without someone making a move.”

Garnet took a peek: an infinite burst of color hit her, unlike the long dark streams before this conversation. She couldn’t get lost in all the futures, not now. “Find another way,” she said to Rose Quartz. “Think about Pearl.”

Rose Quartz smiled wryly. “I’m curious to see how our relationship changes. Children are half their parent’s legacy and half their own. Pearl will be free to choose, then.”

“She’s been free to choose since before the war,” Garnet said in reply. “And even that is not proof enough for you.”

Rose Quartz took a deep breath. “It’s too many things at once,” Rose Quartz said. “It’s exhaustion, it’s love, it’s – maybe it’s the wrong way to think of how to free everyone. Maybe I am being selfish. I can’t ignore that I don’t have new answers to new questions. What happens now can’t be up to me. What happens now must be up to both humans and gems. We can’t always be so apart from them. There’s more at stake here than… us.”

With Rose Quartz, it was always the long game. Always the high road. It was impossible for Rose Quartz to belong to one gem or one family: she was always playing to a different tune. Her plans for humanity were cooking along her plans for gems, her plans for Pearl, her plans for herself. It was impossible to figure her out in totality. Still Garnet couldn’t shake it off, a sudden doom that lay before her, the end of their half-peace and the start, maybe, of another fraught existence. How could she accept it? Even with love somewhere there – for Greg, for Pearl – Garnet couldn’t see past the wall of pain she knew was coming.

“Don’t,” was all she could say, and she could hear all the gems who’d given themselves up for this fight agreeing with her. “Not you.”

“It’s still a long way off,” Rose Quartz said. “And I have Greg’s feelings to consider.” she smiled wryly. “I’m not entirely selfish, you know.”

“Just mostly,” Garnet said, but she didn’t really mean that.

“I’m sorry,” Rose Quartz said in reply. “I really am.”

//

//

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. Concrit, comments, and so on are always appreciated. Cross posted on ateliersockpuppet dot tumblr dot com.


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